Meeting Your Team

Meeting Your Team

Once you have a new job, you'll receive an important e-mail from the president on your first day with the team. By clicking "Attend Meetings," you'll enter a conversation with the president and your assistant coach where you'll go over some important information and make some choices. We'll take these one at a time.

Meeting the President

The first meeting you'll have is with the president of the board. As the head coach, you don't have too many bosses, but the president is one of them. He sets your budget, has the power to fire you or renew your contract, and you'll interact with him if you need to request a raise on the Scouting limits or personnel caps.

You don't necessarily need to suck up to the guy -- if there's a problem, let him know -- but it's often a good idea to at least get to know him. Depending on what your specific answers are during the meeting, you can get your professional relationship off to a good (or bad!) start.

The president always offers the same conversation topics in the same order regardless of what team you're on. Note that if the president is replaced due to an Ownership Takeover, you will not have to go through this conversation again. It only applies when you take control of a new team.

Topic 1: Team History

By your request, the president will send you an e-mail the next day giving you a run down of the team's history. The information in the e-mail can be accessed through the team's profile screen either way.

Topic 2: Team Goal and Budget

The president will tell you what he expects of the team for the first season. Oftentimes it's as simple as "Get promoted" or at least "Be in a good position" at the end of the season.

The president will then tell you the overall payroll budget (which includes staff as well as players) and the transfer budget for the year. You can accept the budget as is, but if you don't like it, you can tell the president here.

If you dispute the budget, you'll get an e-mail the next day from the board. Oftentimes, the board will authorize more money but only if they increase their expectation. For example, they may offer you $1 million expecting you to be in a good promotion, but they may offer $1.2 million if you guarantee a league promotion. Be careful here: if you accept the amended budget and fall short of the expectation, you'll likely be fired.

Even if you initially dispute the budget, you can always retroactively accept it the next day through the e-mail if you think you won't be able to meet the board's new expectation.

Topic 3: Media Meet 'n Greet

The president will tell you that it's tradition for a new coach to have a press conference. Accepting it will let fans, journalists, and even your team to get some overarching information about you and your philosophy. It's up to you whether to go for it.

Closing

The president will close the meeting by thanking you for your time, then pass the meeting off to your assistant coach. You can choose to delay the meeting or cancel it entirely if you wish, but there's rarely a reason to do so.

Meeting Your Assistant Coach

Your assistant coach is your second-in-command of all football operations, and by default will handle all tasks that you don't want to do yourself. This meeting with him will establish exactly what those tasks will be, though you can always override them by changing the Staff Responsibilities.

Topic 1: Team Report

Your assistant's first act will be to offer you a report on the team. If you accept, you'll get an e-mail the next day that will quickly send you to the team depth chart. This will give you a quick overview of your team's overall strengths, as well as what positions you're weak in.

Topic 2: Staff Meeting

Your assistant will suggested a staff meeting so you can see what each staff member believes will help the team. You can access this command any time by selecting "Backroom Advice" in the team menu, but by selecting it here in the assistant's meeting, you'll be sure to have an e-mail about it so you won't forget.

Topic 3: Future Staff Meetings

As a reminder for backroom advice, your assistant can e-mail you regularly to remind you to have staff meetings. You can select to have him e-mail you every two weeks, every month, every three months, or not at all. Again, you can hold a staff meeting any time you wish, but the reminders will help you in case you forget. Even if you hold a staff meeting, you are never required to follow their advice. You are the boss, after all.

Topic 4: Task Delegation

Perhaps the most important topic during the meeting, this topic allows you to set what tasks will be delegated to the assistant coach. We'll take them in order here, but for more details, please read the Staff Responsibilities section of the wiki.

Agent Offers: Agents will frequently offer their clients to all teams. You can set your assistant coach to filter out certain offers based on your team needs. For example, you can ask to see only agent offers for unemployed players. That way, you won't have to see agent offers for players that you'd have to pay a transfer fee for.

Friendlies: By default, you're tasked with arranging and controlling friendly matches. You can delegate arranging them to the assistant, controlling them to the assistant, or arranging and controlling them to the assistant.

Match Preparation Training: By default, you have full control over Match Preparation and opposition players' individual instructions. Here, you can delegate either or both responsibilities to your assistant.

Press Conferences: By default, you are to attend all press conferences. Here, you can delegate it to your assistant. Note that if you choose to delegate it, you will never see a press conference offer until you disable the delegation in the Staff Responsibilities screen. However, if you choose to attend them, you can always ask your assistant to attend a specific press conference here or there via e-mail.

Reserves and Youth Teams: You can elect to coach all games played by your reserves and youth teams, but doing so will effectively double how many matches you manage in a given season. You can delegate them to you assistant instant, and further ask him to use the same match tactics as your first team to ensure that the youngsters are being taught within your system.

Pep Talks: You can let your assistant take of any pep talks before, during, and after all matches. Similar to press conferences, you can still select to let your assistant do specific pep talks during games if you wish.

Once you set delegations, the meetings will end, and you'll be back to the main screen. Remember, you may still have a few things to do based on whether you asked for additional e-mails or information, but now is the time to start Scouting your team, setting Tactics and Training, or refining Staff Responsibilities.

Hiring Coaches

After looking over your staff, you may notice some positions missing, such as a Director of Football. If you have any gaps, you can now place an advertisement to try to attract someone to the position. To do this, first go to your home screen, then visit the Job Center by hovering the cursor over "Jobs" and selecting "Job Center." Then, click the "Place Advert" button in the bottom-right corner, then select what position you want to advertise. Alternatively, you can just do a basic staff search to look for some new blood.

Be aware of your Finances. Every contract you sign adds to the payroll, and it's players who win matches, not superfluous coaches. Your assistant manager can handle a lot of day-to-day activities, such as managing the youth teams, so you'll want to keep the number of your staff fairly low if possible.

Still, it's easy to have too few staff as well. If there's an opening you need to fill and have the cash to spare, don't hesitate if it'll make your team better.